Gender Trouble - Chapter 3. Subversive Bodily Acts

Chapter 3. Subversive Bodily Acts

i. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva: In response to the work of Jacques Lacan that posited a paternal Symbolic order and a repression of the "feminine" required for language and culture, Julia Kristeva added women back into the narrative by claiming that poetic language—the "semiotic" —was a surfacing of the maternal body in writing, uncontrolled by the paternal logos. For Kristeva, poetic writing and maternity are the sole culturally permissible ways for women to return to the maternal body that bore them, and female homosexuality is an impossibility, a near psychosis. Butler takes on the arguments of Kristeva, claiming that Kristeva's insistence on a "maternal" that somehow precedes culture and on poetry as a return to the maternal body is an essentialist trap: "Kristeva conceptualizes this maternal instinct as having an ontological status prior to the paternal law, but she fails to consider the way in which that very law might well be the cause of the very desire it is said to repress" (90). Butler argues the notion of "maternity" as the long-lost haven for females is a social construction. Butler invokes Foucault's arguments in The History of Sexuality to posit that in fact the notion that maternity precedes or defines women is itself a product of discourse. Thus perhaps repression produces the object that it comes to deny; that is, the paternal law (the symbolic) invents a notion of "feminine" that it then "represses."

ii. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity: Here Butler dismantles part of Foucault's critical introduction to the journals he published of the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, who lived in France during the 19th century and eventually committed suicide when s/he was forced to live as a man by the authorities. In his introduction to the journals Foucault writes of Herculine's early days, when she was able to live her gender or "sex" as she saw fit as a "happy limbo of nonidentity" (94). Butler reads such a statement as romanticism on Foucault's part, claiming that Foucault's proclamation of a blissful identity "prior" to cultural inscription contradicts his work in The History of Sexuality, in which he posits that the idea of a "real" or "true" or "originary" sexual identity is an illusion, in other words that "sex" is not the solution to the repressive system of power but part of that system itself. Butler instead places Barbin's early day not in a "happy limbo" but along a larger trajectory, always part of a larger network of social control. She suggests finally that Foucault's surprising deviation from his ideas on repression in the introduction might be a sort of "confessional moment," or vindication of Foucault's own homosexuality of which he rarely spoke and on which he permitted himself only once to be interviewed.

iii. Monique Wittig: Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex: Here Butler traces Wittig's thinking about lesbianism as the one recourse to the constructed notion of sex. The notion of "sex" is always coded as female, according to Wittig, a way to designate the non-male through an absence. Women, thus reduced to "sex," cannot escape carrying sex as a burden. Wittig argues that even the naming of the body parts creates a fiction and constructs the features themselves, fragmenting what was really once "whole." Language, repeated over time, "produces reality-effects that are eventually misperceived as 'facts" (115).

iv. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions: Butler begins by questioning the notion that "the body" itself is a natural entity that "admits no genealogy," a usual given without explanation: "How are the contours of the body clearly marked as the taken-for-granted ground or surface upon which gender signification are inscribed, a mere facticity devoid of value, prior to significance?" (129). Building on the thinking of Mary Douglas outlined in her Purity and Danger, Butler claims that the boundaries of the body have been drawn to instate certain taboos about limits and possibilities of exchange. Thus the hegemonic and homophobic press has read the pollution of the body that AIDS brings about as corresponding to the pollution of the homosexual's sexual activity, in particular his crossing the forbidden bodily boundary of the perineum. In other words, Butler's claim is that "the body is itself a consequence of taboos that render that body discrete by virtue of its stable boundaries" (133). Butler proposes the practice of drag as a way to destabilize the exteriority/interiority binary, finally to poke fun at the notion that there is an "original" gender, and to demonstrate playfully to the audience, through an exaggeration, that all gender is in fact scripted, rehearsed, and performed.